(Yicai) March 19 -- Tencent Holdings plans to double investment in artificial intelligence this year, its president said after the Chinese internet giant posted double-digit earnings growth for last year, driven by AI-enabled gains across its core businesses of gaming, advertising, and cloud services.

“We expect to more than double the investments in Hunyuan, Yuanbao, and other new AI products in 2026, which we intend to fund from increasing earnings from our core businesses,” Martin Lau said on Tencent’s earnings conference call yesterday. “These are upfront investments required to build the necessary foundation to unlock new value as opposed to ongoing operating expenses.”

The Shenzhen-based company invested CNY18 billion (USD2.6 billion) in AI product development last year, including more than CNY7 billion in the fourth quarter alone, Lau said. “These figures are only for Hunyuan and Yuanbao and exclude AI initiatives supporting our existing products and services and costs arising from providing graphics processing units to external customers via Tencent Cloud,” he noted.

Tencent’s shares [HKG: 0700] closed 6.8 percent lower at HKD513 (USD65.51) each in Hong Kong today, extending the stock’s decline since the end of last year to more than 14 percent. The benchmark Hang Seng Index gave up 2 percent.

Net profit calculated on the basis of International Financial Reporting Standards climbed 16 percent to CNY224.8 billion (USD32.6 billion) in the 12 months ended Dec. 31, Tencent’s annual financial report showed yesterday. Revenue rose 14 percent to CNY751.8 billion (USD109 billion).

“We sustained healthy growth rates in 2025, as AI capabilities improved our advertisement targeting and supported more engagement with our games, and as our cloud business delivered improving revenue growth and profit at scale,” said founder Pony Ma.

“Our highly resilient and cash generative core businesses provide us with the resources to fund our increasing investments in AI,” noted Ma, who is also Tencent’s chairman and chief executive. “The increasing intelligence of our Hunyuan 3.0 large language model, and the utility of our AI products, such as Yuanbao, WorkBuddy, and QClaw, are encouraging early signs that these investments will unlock new opportunities.”

Income from domestic and international gaming climbed 18 percent to CNY164.2 billion and 33 percent to CNY77.4 billion, respectively, while that from fintech and business services grew 8 percent to CNY229.4 billion, reflecting increased demand for cloud and AI-related services.

Revenue from marketing services jumped 19 percent to CNY145 billion, primarily driven by pricing and ad impressions. Pricing benefited from AI-powered ad targeting, advertisers using AI to create more adverts, and a higher proportion of closed-loop ads, while impression growth was mainly buoyed by greater user engagement with some products and modest increases in ad load.

Tencent’s super apps Weixin and WeChat had 1.4 billion combined monthly active users as of Dec. 31, up 2 percent from a year earlier.

“We are building AI agents that autonomously interact on behalf of users within Weixin functionalities, especially mini-programs,” Lau said. “We want AI agents in Weixin to deliver AI productivity that is beneficial to the general public and early adopters, and which will boost ecosystem activity and naturally generate revenue.”

Editor: Dou Shicong, Futura Costaglione